Posts tagged ‘debt ceiling’

RAND PAUL: “No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the “cuts” being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family “saving” $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. But this is the type of math Washington uses to mask the incriminating truth about their unrepentant plundering of the American people.

The truth is that frightening rhetoric about default and full faith and credit of the United States is being carelessly thrown around to ram through a bigger budget than ever, in spite of stagnant revenues. If your family’s income did not change year over year, would it be wise financial management to accelerate spending so you would feel richer? That is what our government is doing, with one side merely suggesting a different list of purchases than the other.”

STEVE CHAPMAN: “Whoever wins this battle, the government’s sea of red ink will keep expanding. The publicly held debt now stands at about $11 trillion. Obama’s budget would have pushed it up to around $20 trillion by 2021. Under either the Boehner plan or the Reid plan, it would exceed $17 trillion.

All this screaming and squabbling, and for what? For a huge increase in the amount of borrowed funds that you and your descendants will have to repay.

Freshmen Republicans in the House rallied behind the “cut, cap and balance” plan, but it amounts to yet another stack of alluring promises. The cuts, $111 billion next year, are not itemized. Neither are the programs that would take a hit from the caps.

The “balance” refers to a constitutional amendment to ban deficit spending. But such an amendment—even in the very unlikely event it could be passed—wouldn’t balance the budget. It would merely commit Congress and the president to approve cuts in spending or increases in revenue that would eliminate the fiscal gap.

It’s not a solution. It’s a promise to come up with a solution, somehow, someday.”

DARJEELING: What have we learned with this debt-ceiling “crisis”? NO ONE gets between Democrats/Liberals/Progressives/Socialists and their ability to spend your money. Republicans — Tea Party or not — always cower in fear at cutting meal-tickets, if it means alienating moderate voters (Republicans lost this battle for the simple reason they weren’t able to properly articulate why the world wouldn’t end if the debt-ceiling wasn’t raised). Moderate (“wishy washy”) voters always favor compromise for compromise’s sake because they don’t pay enough attention or have enough principle to know better. And the mainstream media always knows how to dumb the nuance out of any discussion about making real spending cuts and sending our country down the path of fiscal solvency.

NICK GILLESPIE AND MATT WELCH: “While the government continues to borrow more than 40 cents for every dollar it spends, neither Obama or Boehner has proposed reducing year-over-year government expenditures by a penny. To the extent that Obama’s preferred path can even be divined from his peevish oracular pronouncements about “eating peas,” he’s talking about raising annual government spending from $3.8 trillion this year to $5.7 trillion in 2021. The 10-year budget plan that Boehner and the Republicans are pushing calls for spending $4.7 trillion in 2021.

Only in Washington can minor trims in massive anticipated spending hikes be considered budget “cuts.” Which explains why the bond-rating agency Standard & Poor’s has warned that whatever happens this week regarding the debt ceiling, the US needs to present a credible long-term plan in the next three months to stabilize and decrease its staggering debt load or face a credit downgrade.

The debt limit, in other words, is just the canary in the coal mine. The real problem is a long-term trend that can’t be explained away with slippery language.”

THOMAS SOWELL: “Regardless of how the current crisis is resolved, Moody’s suggestion of repealing the national debt-ceiling law deserves some very serious thought, because that law is the crucial factor in the political games that allow big spenders to blame others for the consequences of their own irresponsibility.‘

HINKLE: “...those opposed to raising the debt ceiling—or willing to do so in exchange for a slowdown in the rate of government growth—are “obstreperous,” “flatly and dangerously wrong,” and “not interested in governing.” (These are all quotes from major media organs, not obscure blogs.) They’re “crazy” proponents of a “dangerous delusion”—”ridiculous,” “extremist,” “ultraorthodox tax haters,” players of “ideological games,” “totally unrealistic,” authors of “madness,” etc. etc. Hey, what happened to people of conviction? Aren’t the Tea Partiers “firebrands”? Isn’t there little doubt where their hearts lie? Rather than praise Tea Partiers as passionate advocates for their beliefs, many in the press have taken to marginalizing them with mean-spirited attacks on their sanity.”

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“At this point it might be useful to clarify precisely what the dispute concerns. The question is not whether the federal government should grow. As Reason’s Nick Gillespie pointed out a few days ago, nearly nobody in Washington has actually proposed shrinking the leviathan. To the contrary, the dispute is whether to raise federal spending from the current $3.8 trillion to $4.7 trillion over the next decade (the Paul Ryan plan)—or to $5.7 trillion (the Obama plan). Bear in mind that those increases would come on top of one of the fastest expansions of federal spending in U.S. history. When President Obama took office, the budget stood at $2.9 trillion. Two. Point. Nine. Spending has risen 30 percent in the past three years.”